


Adagio, Pianissimo

by LadyShadowphyre



Series: Familiar'verse [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Castiel and Jimmy Novak are Twins (Supernatural), Castiel and Jimmy Novak are shapeshifters, Dean Winchester is Sir Not Appearing, Lawyer Sam Winchester, M/M, Magical Backlash, Police Officer Castiel (Supernatural), Supportive Castiel (Supernatural), Supportive Dean Winchester, Supportive Sam Winchester, Witch Sam Winchester, Witch's Familiar Castiel (Supernatural)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:20:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21959515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyShadowphyre/pseuds/LadyShadowphyre
Summary: There's nothing worse than suffering from magical backlash except perhaps suffering alone because you reflexively blocked your bonds with your familiar and your brother to protect them when the pain hit. Fortunately for Sam, his familiar knows how to make it better once he gets home.
Relationships: Castiel/Sam Winchester
Series: Familiar'verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1236230
Comments: 12
Kudos: 61





	Adagio, Pianissimo

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theboyandtheangel](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=theboyandtheangel).



> Merry happy whatever to theboyandtheangel from your Sastiel Secret Santa-Type Person! This bunny jumped up and bit me the moment I got you, so I hope it brought you as much joy to read as I got writing it! ^______^

**T** HE DOOR TO the apartment clicking as it swung open and then slamming shut again echoed like the crack of thunder in Sam Winchester's ears, even muffled through the layers of blanket and pillows surrounding his head. He whimpered as the noise sent a spike of pain lancing through his skull, and the footsteps which had been approaching the bedroom faltered before becoming much softer.

"Sam?"

The voice was soft, kept below conversation level, but still louder than was comfortable. Sam whimpered softly in response from beneath the covers, and heard the shift and shuffle and muted thunk of shoes being removed before the quiet rasp of socks against carpet could be heard. The bedroom door was eased open, the squeal of the hinges kept quieter by the slowness of the movement, and then the mattress dipped beside him as someone sat on the bed.

"Oh, Sam..." the voice sighed. A hand found its way through the covers to stroke through his hair and Sam felt the telltale brush of skittering warmth and crackling energy nudge up against the shields he'd thrown up out of instinct just before the backlash had hit. He shivered as the magic of his familiar eased along his own, fitting up against him and resting there, not insisting on being allowed entry, but letting him know he was there.

Cas was there.

"I suppose I shouldn't bother asking why you didn't let me know immediately," the dry voice continued in a murmur that should have been loud yet was somehow softer than even a whisper.

"Nn... case...." Sam mumbled, whining softly in protest when the hand left his hair. There was another rustle, and then the blankets parted and lifted, and a warm, solid body slid between the blankets to press up against his side. Sam found himself curling into that warmth without thought or protest, and a strong arm slid around his waist to hold him close as another forehead touched to his.

"Second-hand backlash headache is one of the acceptable excuses for me to leave work early, you know that," Cas scolded him gently. "The case isn't going anywhere that my being there would help move things any faster than if one of the others took point, and as often as you've helped my squad in the past I think I might have had a riot if they'd known you were ill and I didn't immediately come home to you. Which I would have if you hadn't blocked our link."

"Sorry...." Sam sighed, curling in closer and ducking his head until he could fit it underneath Cas's chin. "Didn't wanna... worry you...."

"I'm going to worry about you anyway," Cas reminded him, the arm wrapped around his waist shifting to tangle in Sam's hair again, making him sigh. "Part of the whole witch-familiar bond we have together. How long ago?"

"...Three-ish," Sam mumbled, his head still not up to parsing the math to tell Cas how long it had been since the backlash hit, just able to say when he'd started working and hope Cas could work it out. Against him, Cas went very still, then let out a breath in a long sigh.

"It's a quarter past six," he informed his witch, the words barely breathed against Sam's face from this close. "Food?"

"Nuh-uh," Sam didn't dare shake his head in answer, the roiling in his gut and the renewed pounding in his head at even the mention of food making eating an unappealing prospect.

"Broth, then," Cas gave a tiny nod. "Water?"

"Mmhm," Sam had at least managed that much, taking tiny sips whenever he could bear to move from the water bottle he kept by the bed in case he got thirsty in the middle of the night. He'd barely made it to the bed as it was, and the water bottle had gone dry before Cas had made it home. "'Mpty."

"Do you want me to refill it now?" Cas asked.

"Nuh-uh," Sam muttered, curling even closer. The offer was appreciated, or would be when his head stopped trying to split open, but right now all he wanted was Cas. Fortunately, even with their bond locked down still, Cas was well-versed in understanding Sam and settled back down into the mattress beside his witch, stroking through the taller man's hair with gentle fingers.

"You'll need to let me up to make you some broth and get more water later though," he warned softly, then brushed a kiss across Sam's forehead and sighed. A moment later, despite him retaining human form, he began to purr, the vibrations emerging in a low, rhythmic rumble from deep in his chest in a way no human could ever manage.

It wasn't precisely like a switch being flipped, but it almost felt that way. The rumbling vibration and subvocal harmonics that Sam couldn't actually hear but Cas had tried to describe for him in the past pushed through the pounding in Sam's head and the nausea roiling in his gut, lessening the immediacy of those sensations. The sound itself created a penetrating white noise that drowned out all the distant creaks of the building and roars and shrieks of traffic and the screams of birds and random passerby that had driven Sam to cower beneath the muffling covers. The hand stroking through his hair helped to further soothe the ache and throb in his skull-- Cas was probably using his favorite trick in his arsenal as Sam's familiar to shift the pain, something that Sam preferred Cas avoid doing most of the time, not wanting him to suffer along with Sam, but right now he couldn't muster the energy to protest around the slowly creeping relief that he no longer hurt so much.

He slept, drifting off between one gentle caress and the next, lulled down into the healing comfort of sleep by the warmth of Cas, his scent in Sam's nose and his purr surrounding him like a shield. He didn't even stir when Cas eventually left their nest of blankets to refill the water bottle and heat up a mug of enriched organic chicken broth, only rousing when the bed dipped again beneath Cas's returning weight and the scent of the broth mingled with Cas's scent of leather and smoke. "Mn?"

"A little before eight," Cas answered, gently coaxing the blanket away from Sam's face. "Think you can try drinking the broth yet?"

Hesitantly, Sam opened his eyes. The darkness of the apartment wasn't absolute, but it was close enough that Sam's head did not immediately begin screaming at him again, and the broth actually smelled good, so he let Cas help him sit up enough to sip at it cautiously, leaning against Cas's chest to stay upright enough not to spill his meal all over the bed or himself. Even so, he only managed perhaps a third of the mug before his stomach twinged in protest and he turned his head away.

"Thanks, Cas," he mumbled as the other man obediently set the mug of broth on the bedside table and resumed carding his finger through Sam's hair.

"Just doing my job," his familiar murmured back, reassurance and gentle chastisement both equally plain in his tone. Sam winced, this time from chagrin rather than pain.

"Sorry," he sighed. And he was sorry for worrying his familiar. He might eventually even be sorry for not at least shooting Cas a text to warn him about what was going on, but he couldn't bring himself to regret closing off their bond the way he had to protect Cas from being caught in the backlash along with Sam. "Didn't want to get you in trouble with Captain Holt."

"Captain Holt knows the risks of employing me and, by extension, you," Cas reminded him with a sigh. "He knows that you're my first priority, always, and accepts and respects that even if he doesn't necessarily like it. And he missed your presence today."

This was mostly true. Captain Raphael Holt wasn't quite so understanding as Captain Cohen had been about one of his best detectives turning into a cat and being bound and partnered to a witch who was also a lawyer, but the man was nothing if not pragmatic. So long as any information Cas found while transformed was backed up by hard evidence, he was willing to look the other way on exactly how that information was gathered, treating things Cas overheard while in cat form the same way he would any other anonymous tip.

The idea that Captain Holt had actively missed him being around the precinct was ludicrous, however. Sam couldn't help but feel like the police Captain only put up with him because Cas was just too good a detective to antagonize by running off his witch, so Sam would often do his best to make himself scarce and "let the detectives do their work in peace" without his technically civilian arse getting in the way. Copping to the Hunter background had been the deciding factor in Captain Holt grudgingly allowing Sam in as an official consultant and Cas's occasional ride-along, but Sam didn't kid himself into thinking the man did more than tolerate his existence.

"I didn't want to be a distraction," he finally settled on, pulling a face at the look Cas shot him. "You know I can be sometimes, especially when I've got a project or a case of my own, and you don't need my nervous energy feeding yours in close quarters when you're on the job." It wasn't like they even had to be in close quarters either, not with as strong as the bond between them was, and if Sam being distracted ended up distracting Cas then Detective Urie complained until everyone else was just as distracted. "I figured it was better to block the connection temporarily than risk catching you off-guard in a bad moment."

"If I was out in the field or on a stake out, what you did would still be incredibly dangerous but probably more justified. I was at a desk." Cas shook his head. "What even started this? You didn't have anything beyond looking over some briefs scheduled for today."

"Dean," Sam admitted with a sigh, lips twitching when Cas snorted in amusement. "He called me to help him track this thief who broke into one of Dad's old storage lockers. Turns out the woman is wanted by the FBI, too, so Henricksen agreed to my usual fee."

That was an oversimplification of events, and Sam could tell that Cas knew that from the irritated huff he gave that Sam felt more than heard. A simple tracking spell wouldn't have so much as winded Sam, never mind laying him flat for - Sam cautiously peered over at the bedside table where the clock was sitting - four hours and twenty-seven minutes. Dean had called Sam originally thinking that whoever had broken into the storage unit, which Dean kept up on payments for thanks to having a steady job and technically steady home address, had to be a witch given how they'd broken through the wards on the place. After the obligatory mutual griping over John Winchester's hypocritical paranoia of having wards on a storage unit while trying to kill his younger son for having natural magic, Dean had asked Sam to take a Look.

That had surprised Sam. It wasn't something Sam did very often, not because it was difficult, but because of how uncomfortable it made Dean feel. They'd discovered the ability Sam had to "piggyback" his awareness onto Dean through the bond between their souls only after Sam had met the shapeshifter twins John Castiel and James Constantine Novak and bonded with Cas. Sam and Cas had discovered they could piggyback on each other through the familiar/witch bond, seeing through each other's eyes and hearing with each other's ears, even puppeting each other's hands under certain circumstances. Dean, with no active magic or powers of his own and a lifetime of John's brainwashing about anything supernatural being bad, couldn't bring himself to try and reach along their bond to "possess" Sam, but he trusted Sam explicitly and completely. To that end, Sam refrained from doing it unless Dean asked him to or it was an emergency and Dean was out of contact and unconscious.

Dean asking him to "hitch a ride in my head, see if you can spot the trail" was what had tipped them off that it wasn't a witch but an ordinary thief with some pretty powerful magic trinkets for getting around wards and hiding from the law. A phone call to Dean's partner, Special Agent Victor Henricksen, and they had a name to match the description Sam recited through Dean's mouth. The actual "heavy lifting" had come when Sam followed up on Vic's request to get a tracker on Bela Talbot. He'd done it, but he'd had to punch his way through the charms she had on her person to do it, and the brute force method of taking down other people's magic always left him suffering backlash.

"Might have a visit from a pissed off witch wanting to know how I broke the magic on the amulet Bela was using to hide," Sam admitted as an afterthought. "The spellwork was only about two hundred years old."

"Only you," Cas sighed, resuming his stroking of Sam's hair. "Well, you and Dean. I thought Jimmy and I were magnets for trouble, being black cats, but you and your brother give me and mine a run for our money!"

"Sorry," Sam said again, smiling a little when Cas snorted.

"Think you can drink some more of the broth?" When Sam shook his head, Cas sighed and nudged Sam back down into the embrace of the mattress. "Go back to sleep, then. I'll text Dean to let him know you're recovering so he stops breaking the speed limit trying to get here and check on you himself, then join you."

"Okay," Sam mumbled, eyes already slipping closed again. He heard the beeps of the cell phone as Cas sent the text, followed by the click of the phone dropping to the nightstand. A moment later, the weight on the bed shifted and a small furry body wriggled its way beneath the covers to curl up against Sam's chest just under his chin. Sam obligingly wrapped his arms around the fluffy black-brown cat, stroking his familiar's fur, and Cas obliged him in turn by resuming his purring.

 _Sleep, Sam,_ he heard drift across his mind. _I will watch over you._

And he did.

**=End=**


End file.
